Big Art Group is a New York based experimental performance ensemble founded by Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson in 1999. Big Art Group uses language and media to push formal boundaries of theatre, film and visual arts; it creates culturally transgressive works and innovative performances using original text, technology and experimental methods of communication. The company has produced eleven original works, including CLEARCUT, catastrophe(1999) TheBalladeer(2000), Shelf Life(2001), Flicker(2002), House of No More(2004), Dead Set #2 and #3(2006-7), The People(2007), Cinema Fury: The Sleep(2007), Cinema Fury: The Imitation(2008), and SOS(2008). In these pieces director Caden Manson invented the integrated spectacle ‘Real-Time Film,’ a hybrid of cinema and theatre in which actors recombined formal ideas of performance through the use of simultaneous acting on stage and for live video using complex choreography, puppetry and autobiography. The company’s works exists in the contemporary stream of expanded performance, wherein traditional narratives and established performer-audience relationships have been opened up to create possibilities of innovative discovery. The work blends high and low technology, marginal and mainstream culture, and blunt investigation to drive questions about contemporary experience.

In its history, the company has grown from a small New York underground performance group to an internationally prominent and critically recognized ensemble with reviews in performance literature (Theatre Journal, TDR, PAJ, Mouvement, Theatre Heute,) grants from The Jerome Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, DNA (Andrew W. Mellon foundation and Arts International,) Florence Gould Foundation, MAP Fund, étant donnés, and multiple invitations and co-productions from leading festivals and presenters of experimental performance (Hebbel am Ufer Berlin, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Wiener Festwochen, Szene Salzburg, PS122, Wexner Center for the Arts, DTW and the Kitchen.)